The development of the spoken corpus of Japanese learner English

1. Introduction To keep up with the information-driven society, it must be one of the most important things to acquire foreign languages, especially English for international communications. In order to develop a computer-assisted language teaching and learning environment, we have been compiling a large-scale speech corpus of Japanese learner English, which provides a lot of useful information to construct a model of the developmental stages of Japanese learners' speaking ability. In this paper, first, we will present the overview of this project by introducing the activities done so far such as its data collection procedure, annotation schemes including error tagging, and the development of the original software tool which makes data collection process easier. Secondly, we will explain how this corpus can be exploited for second language acquisition research or system development by introducing several experiments we have done so far, such as a linguistic analysis on how the English article system is acquired by Japanese learners of different proficiency levels and the attempts to automatic processing of learners' language in collaboration with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.